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IPCC authors: Himalayan glacier scare just guesswork

The BBC reports:

Although the latest global update on climate change says the vast majority of glaciers worldwide have continued to shrink, scientists have admitted that the Himalayas remain an area where they still have very limited information.

Glaciologists involved in the cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) first phase report, launched last week, said there was no good sample of Himalayan glaciers that could help them forecast their future behaviour.

“The Himalayas are one of the areas we really are data-poor,” said Prof David Vaughan from Cambridge University, UK, and one of the two lead coordinating authors of the ice chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)…

But scientists involved in the latest IPCC report said there had been very little ground-truthing of the satellite imagery obtained for the Himalayas.

“Ground measurements are still very few, and, in addition, these few are usually limited to very small and not very representative glaciers,” said Prof Georg Kaser, a University of Innsbruck, Austria, glaciologist and a lead author on AR5’s cryosphere chapter.

“Field work on these glaciers is extremely difficult and also dangerous on an unacceptable scale. There is no way to overcome this, and this fact is also one of the reasons why we knew so little about these glaciers – giving thus also good reasons for [exaggerated] guesses.”

5 thoughts on “IPCC authors: Himalayan glacier scare just guesswork”

MT: yup, clearly you. However – all you have to do to be Saved is Believe! Be Healed, my brother, and bask in the approbation and respect of Governments, Media, & all Right-Thinking people, who say the Right Thing(s)! ( Well, really Left things, but don’t worry your pretty little head over such details.)

I must have a touch of paranoia. I notice that the climate models unanimously overstate warming. I notice that, when there’s no information, the presumption is that humans are causing a warming-related harm (the glaciers that may or may not be receding in the Himalayas and it may or may not be due to warming). I notice that historic temperature records are “adjusted”, always downward and with no explanation of the adjustment. I notice that the scientists who wrote the back of the IPCC AR say that the front part bears no resemblance to the back part.
And then I feel suspicious about the global warming science and agenda alike.
Must be me.

“Field work on these glaciers is extremely difficult and also dangerous on an unacceptable scale. There is no way to overcome this, and this fact is also one of the reasons why we knew so little about these glaciers – giving thus also good reasons for [exaggerated] guesses.”

I want to comment but the above sentence leaves me at a loss for words. OMG